


The Dust Returning

by fluffykomodo (god_is_undead)



Series: A Distant Star [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Does he survive this second civil war IDK maybe, I Don't Even Know, I should be shot, I wrote this instead of the 1000 other things I need to write, I'm Bad At Tagging, I'm Going to Hell, I'm Sorry, Old Age, Veers survived everything and is now living in First Order territory, Well for a given value of canon since I play by horror movie rules and i never saw Veerses body, including my stupid coursework
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-02 18:19:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10950096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/god_is_undead/pseuds/fluffykomodo
Summary: Maximilian Veers attends a party shortly after the destruction of the Hosnian system and has thoughts.Militarytacticscritic!Veers, for what it’s worth.Warning: willy nilly abuse of Legends material where canon doesn't exist anymore





	The Dust Returning

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize if I’ve fucked up any details vis what happened after Jakku, I haven’t read new canon and all I know is from glancing at Wookipedia. Um. Sorry.
> 
> I also…really hope I didn’t fuck this up and write Veers OOC; I’ve literally never tried to write this character before. Sorry if I did…I have a slight obsession with stories about people who outlive things. It's...quite often a theme in things I write. Oops. What I DO know is that I have experienced BITTER resentment of schoolhouse peeps thinking they know better than people who have been doing the job for forever in a military setting, so I do not mean to write Veers as if he's whining. Because he's very much not intended to be.
> 
> Also I really should fucking concentrate on one fucking story I’ve already fucking published, but…eh. I’ll get there. I work on everything, just in different stages, and I get taken by flights of fancy. I may or may not write more about the dystopic shitshow I imagine the First Order society to be.
> 
> Read the endnotes if you’re interested in contextual commentary about this fic. You're probably not but whatever.

Maximilian Veers sat with a beer in a tall glass at a table at the edge of the room, these days decidedly beyond the point of giving a tinker’s damn what these prissy shits thought about him. It wasn’t like he had any rungs left to climb. The tender droid knew how to pull a draft, and Max wasn’t going to choose champagne instead on account of their sensitivities.

Obviously, it couldn’t be that bad or they’d stop inviting him.

He could still see Firmus glancing at him sideways in the officer’s lounge on the _Executor_ , that fleeting and invisible shade of exasperation over grog after the end of a shift.

Schoolmasters and sycophants, all that was left of the once-great Galactic Empire, slowly rotting away and clutching at the edge of known space and to their pearls, muttering about the day they would return to Coruscant, or, as they insisted with a singular obsession that hadn’t been in evidence during the Emperor’s reign, Imperial Center.

He took a savage gulp of his drink as his eyes found Brendol Hux in the thick of the crowd, increasingly turgid in his waning years (and therefore looking rather reminiscent of Ozzel while he was at it), silver shot through the now-faded red of his hair (not that Max was any better off there; _his_ was full white). That son of his— _Armitage?_ —had been promoted to _General of the First Order_ a few years ago.

What a kriffing farce that was.

The boy had never even seen real combat but you would never know it, the way Brendol spoke. Not that Brendol Hux had any idea what real combat meant either.  The son headed a force that had never been in more than a few border skirmishes. _And yet it’s not about the boy, not for him_. Brendol Hux, who was a useless sack of bantha shit except behind a podium talking theory like it was the same thing as experience—

Max had only met the child in person once, years ago now but soon after Jakku, when the dust settled in the Unknown Regions and Nall was barely a rock where an exhausted fleet had stopped, not yet the would-be outpost of civilization they would have themselves believe. A whip-thin intense little thing with green eyes and Brendol’s flaming red hair, evacuated from Arkanis. Now he gave speeches, a lot of them, though Max didn't often turn on his holo to listen.

What was it the Commandant had told him when he breezed in, almost fresh from his desk job, sweeping all aside as he stood with Grand Admiral Sloane? _The Empire needs children_. There had also been something about orphans, and…

The thought struck right to the quick, too fast to avert and slamming unexpectedly into him.

He hadn’t seen his own son in, literally, decades. Zev would be getting past middle-age now; did he have a wife? Did Max have grandchildren? _Great_ -grandchildren?

He grasped his glass with an acute agony that ran fast and deep beneath the rock of composure, stuck in this room at the ass-end of the galaxy. In his mind, his wife’s grinning face flashed past accompanied by a dull pang, a face suspended in sparkling, untarnished youth, which he remembered Zev so closely resembled it hurt. It felt like a different lifetime. Would she have even recognized him now, or had he changed too much?

He hated these get-togethers. Why did he even bother coming? For form’s sake, after all these years? Certainly, not for the ambiance.

His thoughts drifted back, and back, to the state dinners on Coruscant, banners and streamers bearing the Imperial cog fluttering high above and glittering lights like stars, long fields of smiling faces in colorful clothing under airy vastness and the shimmer of the city stretching around the horizon beyond in the twilight; what he saw now was a vast diminishment, a single ballroom in Carida under harsh artificial lighting—Carida, named after the planet, but no more than the second largest city in First Order territory on the planet Nall—with faces so redundantly familiar to him by now that his social circle seemed inbred, and pitiful little red flags with the First Order’s hexagon-bordered wheel in black on the walls.

It was all that was left, these schoolmasters and sycophants; few enough like him were left, whose loyalty had been to the Empire and honor enough to send them into exile for the sake of a cause he could never abandon—even more so because to abandon it felt like abandoning _them_ , and the sacrifices they made for a cause they all believed was right. That he _still_ believed was right.

Faces danced in his mind’s eye: what would Firmus Piett have thought of all this?

The Admiral had gone down with his ship over Endor, the arrow point of the _Executor_ piercing the hide of the second Death Star while Max was dirtside, struggling with the canopy that _should_ have been scorched to the ground so a proper defense perimeter could be erected—but Jerjerrod had never been a military mind, he’d been an architect.

Between Admirals Piett and Ozzel, it struck Max that tonight would have been far more to Ozzel’s tastes. Lorth Needa, the Death Squadron’s own minor aristocrat, _might_ have found these people more bearable than Max did, but the man had been old-stock Coruscanti. Grand gestures were his stock in trade and he had all but been born immune to them. He grew up around these types, but Max was reasonably sure he wouldn’t have been impressed, at any rate, at this shabby costume party.

Schoolmasters and sycophants. Was it any wonder that this First Order knew their rhetoric even better than they knew their weapons?

Max stood and walked away, to the balcony, from the aged scions who had made off with the family silver and old officers like himself, resurrecting the pageantry of their youth, before everything had gone _wrong_.

If this planet resembled any of the extremities he had seen, it was perhaps closest to Endor (though, mercifully, without the Ewoks—he’d have come out of retirement to exterminate the rodents if they had turned up).

Thirty years on, Carida was no ramshackle outpost; it had real pretensions and actual buildings, though treed mountains cupped everything in on all sides like a bowl. It was so much _smaller_ ; he could smell the trees (they smelled something like Endor) and an industrial undercurrent of ion engines and afterburn. He liked being dirtside, and always had, but his issue was not with the terrain.

Night lingered on Nall, and overhead were stars.

 Max had grown very used to unknown stars over the course of his life and rarely gave them a second thought as a younger man.  But even now he could recognize the sight of a Star Destroyer in orbit; the Resurgent-class ships of the First Order were almost twice the length of the Imperial-class Star Destroyers, and in a position that they were easy to spot tonight: a little whitish spot, blurred at the edges, and without fine detail. He wondered which one it was.

The sight of those ships overhead had kept him company over the course of nearly forty years in the Imperial Army, his reassurance (even if he could do for himself without Navy toffs, _thank you very much_ ), and a terror to the enemy. The _Executor_ , meanwhile, a dark gray-blue, had been nearly invisible to the naked eye while dirtside, day or night.

By tomorrow they would be gone, deployed to join up with the younger Hux’s battlegroup, following the destruction of the Hosnian system.

Schoolmasters and sycophants, and children raised by the same; the last people Max would ever trust to run a war.

Assuming this Starkiller Base actually survived much longer.

Maybe the third time would be the charm? Regardless of his loyalties, because though he believed as much as anyone here in the illegitimacy of the New Republic, or whatever the rebel scum chose to call themselves, the tactician in him wasn’t convinced of the long-term prospects for a head-on offensive, even if the notion sang to his blood. The Empire had had the resources of the entire galaxy in hand, the First Order nothing but what they had on hand and whatever support they could get from the pitiful Imperial holdouts. The younger Hux, he assumed, was hoping that his Starkiller would be the deciding factor—but even a Death Star that could kill more than one planet at a time could only be so many places at once.

Max had spent a lifetime turning over tactics and running possibilities in his head; if the boy wanted to fight a war of acquisition against such vastly superior space and numbers he had his work cut out for him; even at the time Max had known that the effectiveness of the rebels had been that they did _not_ hold territory. The scum rarely stood and fought unless they had a tactical advantage and were not burdened with absolutely defending or occupying anything, leaving them free to slip away and conserve their strength.

This was not that kind of war.

Max was reasonably sure Hux’s plan was to, essentially, bum rush the Republic in the confusion left behind by the destruction of the Hosnian system and lean on Starkiller to enforce it with the threat of obliteration. It was possible, likely even, he _would_ make early, stunning gains because the Republic _was_ crippled with most of its fleet vaporized—it was also true that for every man or woman the First Order would lose, the Republic would have a million to field in response, to say nothing of ships and fighters and ground equipment. If met with a stiff fight (and they hadn’t hit the Resistance, so far as Max knew, with that thing), it would only bleed them faster. At worst, the Resistance would revert to type and strike and slip away, gradually eroding the First Order’s limited strength.

The younger Hux would have to move impossibly fast and secure his gains. If he were any kind of strategist he would aim first for specific key systems: Imperial Center, Kuat, so on, and _hold them_ ; Max didn’t have an ear for politics, but he did know how to hold ground. Max wished him all the luck in existence—he wasn’t deaf to his general sentiment—simply might have argued method.

Not that anyone would bother asking _him_. For all they still called him the Hero of Hoth (and invited him to these kriffing get-togethers), Max had been demoted to Captain shortly after Endor and shunted off where no one, officially, had to listen to him. He had worked with Lord Vader, he was suspect (ironic, considering the First Order had long taken its marching orders from _another_ Force-user). Even so, he had chosen his path years ago, and questions felt disloyal and dishonorable.

In the end, here he stood. He refused to regret anything.

And his mind wandered, restless and caged. He’d lost—well, what hadn’t he lost? His life? One by one, the faces of people he’d known had drowned in dust, fossilized in perfect suspension at the time of their deaths or disappearances.

He walked to the side of the balcony, to the stairwell leading down into the gardens. He descended, with only the barest figment of thought to being grateful he still could, and without help. He was over eighty, after all.

Max walked into the silence, away from the thin strains of music he knew by heart to the outer edge of the property.

Well, not silence exactly. No city was ever silent.

The gardens were not large, and the property was bordered with an open fence, beyond which was the ground-level street. This district was mostly upper crust residential, but a pair of Stormtroopers in dress uniform were stumbling along, hanging on each other and laughing loudly. They looked almost exactly alike, if not for the color of their skin; young, with close-cropped regulation haircuts, the  _only_ regulation haircut they could have.

Max studied them in silence, and the brief feeling of awkward voyeurism passed when he remembered it wasn’t as if he had come out here intending to spy. He’d needed some air, so here he was.

Stormtroopers were almost never seen in the cities of the First Order, but they must have been granted shore leave before shipping out tomorrow. It was almost certainly a rare treat for them; or maybe—and this was just his cynicism talking—it was as much encouragement for the people of Carida, who had something on which to dote at the onset of war. The pair probably hadn’t paid for a drink all night.

He turned off the path and into a plotted section overlooking an artificial pond.

Max had joined up only shortly after the end of the Clone Wars, and there had still been some clone troopers in the ranks of his first tour as a young officer, though their rapid aging would count them out before he transferred. He could clearly remember their lined, tan faces with white brows and hair (if they had any) and in some cases tattoos.

Those tattoos, and the right to decorate one’s armor, had been quickly squashed as soon as clone troopers had phased out and volunteers replaced them. Depersonalizing policies had stood for the majority of his time in service. Max tended to agree with the basic premise; it was necessary not because he was against individuality on principle, but because clone troopers were conditioned literally from genetic conception to act with unit cohesion and collective obedience in mind, and needed some means to allow their psyche to cope with being an individual within a collective, whereas volunteers drawn from the vast population of the Empire came as individuals, and needed such uniformity to beat uniform cohesion into their heads.

Now the First Order had gone further than that; Max couldn’t say he _liked_ the idea of stealing children (the recruits in his day had come willingly, and at an adult age), but it was out of his hands. The First Order, the younger Hux, had pioneered this training system working closely with Grand Admiral Sloane to implement it. First Order Stormtroopers were denied any and all evidence of individual personality, and were conditioned over the course of their whole lives.

_Whatever happened to those orphans, anyway?_

Max finished his beer, grimacing at the reflection of Nall’s smaller moon on the pond. He hadn’t allowed himself to think very much about such things; it was easiest for him to frame the debate in a pure numbers game. There, these pruned Stormtroopers were only as limited as the supply. They were exceptionally well-trained, perhaps even better than the ones who had served under himself—but you couldn’t easily replace troops which you had to program from birth, either. There was a trade-off and Hux was banking on not fighting a war of attrition.

 _If I were asked, I’d say Hux’s strategy is a risky one, but it_ does _have its merits and a certain possibility of success, particularly if the Republic shatters and reels—and it_ is _shaky_. Max wasn’t completely sure of _those_ calculations, he’d been far out of the loop for too long on such things, but the situation even superficially was far from absolutely hopeless. The rebels had done much to keep the worst of the old Republic, and if Max had anything to say about the government of his childhood, it was that it enjoyed a lazy complacency which the New Republic could not rely on. After the Jedi had attempted to take over, that superficial trust had been shattered.

Max looked up at the moon itself, then craned his neck back to look at the Star Destroyers in orbit.

He could not say part of him did not wish he were up there, making last-minute inspections and going over supply lists, and ensuring the ground equipment was secured properly for spacetravel, doing something to make himself useful, but he was confined to the surface of Nall, and the company of schoolmasters and sycophants.

He scoffed, faintly. _Can you see this, Firmus?_

**Author's Note:**

> Title snatched from an old song with a fascinating history: http://www.bowersflybaby.com/stories/songs/02_lies.html
> 
> First a song about a plague in India, then a WWI pilot’s song (and we know Veers isn’t a pilot, IDGAF), but it’s not a happy one. Here’s a version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRkQIxwE5lk
> 
> I in fact did Google ‘what would a Star Destroyer look like in orbit’ for this fic and guess what, the fucker would be visible provided it was in a position where sunlight could bounce off of it. Sweet.
> 
> Veers doesn’t get into this aspect, mostly because he’s a military commander and this would be the purview of more of the politically-minded side of things (the military commanders I’ve met, although very intelligent, tend to think mostly of the efficacy of their own immediate operational plans…that’s not a criticism, that’s their job, and that's why you have politically-minded people to do that job), BUT there’s also a lot of problems in store for the FO in terms of how to occupy and administer territory effectively, which itself would be a huge drain on manpower and resources (particularly with the loss of Starkiller); from my personal opinion, I award zero points to Armitage Hux and may god have mercy on his soul for what basically constitutes a situation like STARTING A LAND WAR IN ASIA. 
> 
> Even if he is a pretty little shit of a ginger.
> 
> If I actually chose to keep going with this story this wouldn’t really resemble a normal fic (and I'm not sure I do), because it would involve mostly a lot of old guys hashing out ancient problems, and civilians, and First Order society, which I imagine is essentially a crust of affluence supported by loyalists and enforced by stolen-children-Stormtroopers all mixed up with a nice cocktail of serious indoctrination and a hell of a grudge (resisting the urge to go full Handmaiden’s Tale crossover here…) clashing with the Republic. Basically, the nasty side of the conflict that’s not necessarily so easily distilled into oh hey go blow that up sweet space battle. 
> 
> Plus I totally have everything else I've ever written.
> 
> Although god knows I would loooooooove to see Veers’ reaction to Kylo Ren. He’s one of the few people who could look at Kylo Ren and compare him to the other masked Dark Side-wielder with a penchant for strangulation. 
> 
> ((The beatings will continue until morale improves.)) 
> 
> One of the major criticisms I see of the sequels is the lack of characterization given to the FO; this is valid and yet it is not, mostly because a lot of what constitutes characterization exists outside the movies. And frankly, even in the OT, the Empire didn’t have a personality until after Veers tried to stick up for Admiral Ozzel and then Captain Piett was nervous to be standing next to a strangling Admiral Ozzel, so fucking there. Tarkin’s a lovely piece of work, but Episode 4 generally lacks the human elements of Piett’s disquiet and Jerjerrod’s dilemma. I strongly suspect we'll see such for the FO in Episode VIII.
> 
> And second of all, the FO is heavily indoctrinated. They believe their fucking shit. 
> 
> YEAH. FIGHT ME.
> 
> Edit: er, removed two words for reduncancy issues.


End file.
